Mark Geier had his medical license suspended after the Maryland State Board of Physicians found that his research ‘endangers autistic children.’
The Department of Health and Human Services has selected a well-known vaccine skeptic with a controversial past that includes work using chemical castration to “treat” autism in children to lead a study into the potential links between autism and immunizations.
The Washington Post reports that HHS has hired David Geier to lead the study, despite Geier having been charged in 2011 by the Maryland State Board of Physicians with practicing as a licensed physician despite his only credentials being a Bachelor of Arts degree in biology. He was fined $10,000 for the violation.
Neither Geier nor HHS responded to a request for comment.
The work at issue was undertaken with his father, Mark Geier, who had his medical license suspended in 2011 after the Maryland State Board of Physicians found he “endangers autistic children and exploits their parents by administering to the children a treatment protocol that has a known substantial risk of serious harm and which is neither consistent with evidence-based medicine nor generally accepted in the relevant scientific community.”
The pair worked together using the testosterone suppressant Lupron, which is sometimes used in the chemical castration of sex offenders, to treat children with autism. The Geiers theorized the Lupron would treat a reaction of mercury and testosterone, which they believed contributed to autism. The theory was based on a protocol used to create testosterone crystals for use in X-ray crystallography.
While Abbott Laboratories, the maker of Lupron, at one time cooperated with the Geiers in one of their several patent applications, the drugmaker has since discontinued its work with the duo due to the nonexistence of scientific evidence to justify further research.
In order to assess a child for the Lupron treatment, the Geiers would order dozens of lab tests at a cost of thousands of dollars. Children who showed at least one testosterone-related result as abnormal were deemed eligible for the treatment, which included dosing at ten times the amount prescribed for precocious puberty, one of the drug’s approved uses.
An article in New Scientist from 2007 — four years before Mark Geier would go on to lose his license — discussed how controversial and potentially dangerous the Lupron treatment was.
Geier would use Lupron treatment in conjunction with chelation, which is an established treatment for metals poisoning, to treat what he believed was the impact of the mercury from vaccines.
“Safety is a major concern,” the article read, adding that little was known at the time about chelation’s impact on autistic children, with only mixed anecdotal reporting on its success. At the time, researchers at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health were disallowed from studying the safety of chelation because there was so little evidence in favor of the treatment.
And while the Geiers’s Lupron research was approved by an ethics committee, that committee was later found to be located at the Geier’s business address and was made up of members that included Mark, David and Mark’s wife, alongside a business associate of the Geiers and a lawyer involved in vaccine litigation. Mark Geier later said the make-up of the committee was changed but declined to publicly name the new members.
At the time, an attorney for the Geiers claimed they were being targeted because of their outspoken ideas and that they had not harmed any children.
Attorney Joseph A. Schwartz III said the treatment may be considered “a crazy therapy, but it works” on especially difficult patients.
They further claimed that David Geier worked only in an “administrative” capacity in his father’s offices.
The Lupron protocol, which experts have dismissed as junk science, is based on the false premise that mercury in vaccines causes autism, a theory that has also been roundly debunked by scientists. The Geiers have published numerous studies drawing a link between the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal, and autism, though the preservative had mostly stopped being used in childhood vaccines by 2001.
The elder Geier ultimately had his medical license revoked in all 50 states.
David Geier, meanwhile, is currently listed as a data analyst in the HHS employee directory, according to the Washington Post.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic himself, has frequently cited studies by the Geiers on the purported link between vaccines and autism.
Kennedy’s HHS directed the CDC to conduct a vaccine-autism study earlier this month, days after President Trump discussed the growing prevalence of autism in children during his address before a joint session of Congress.
HHS officials later instructed the CDC to turn over vaccine safety data to the National Institutes of Health, rather than having the CDC conduct the study itself, according to the Washington Post. Geier will reportedly be the lead person analyzing the data, which includes underlying data from four studies on vaccines and autism published in the 2000s.